“What?”the fae asked, blinking innocently.
Kara snorted.“That was almost funny.”
Wadim leaned toward Zara, lowering his voice to the hush of a man dictating field notes.“Documenting: fae humor emerges under conditions of extreme captivity.Also, he knows what manure tastes like.”
“I heard that,” Aphid said.
“I hoped you would,” Wadim replied, without looking up.
Nick should have been relieved.He told himself this firmly.They were alive.They were out of their cages.Kara was safe.The troll child, Torvik, was breathing and whole and currently sitting cross-legged on the stone near Kara’s feet, gazing up at her like she had personally hung the moon and possibly invented snacks.
But his wolf had not settled.Not even a little.
Because ten minutes ago his mate had been in pain.Ten minutes ago some ancient thing beneath the troll realm had pushed up through the stone andtouchedher.He’d felt it and she’d felt it, and still she’d continued.It had attempted to touch the life inside her.And Nick had been behind iron bars, helpless and snarling, while her face went pale and her hand flew to her stomach.She had also threatened to hit him in the face with a troll limb, so he supposed in retrospect, she was probably okay, but that doesn’t change the fact thathewas not okay and wouldn’t truly be okay until he had her in his arms and he could look her over himself.
The memory made his claws press against the inside of his skin, looking for an exit.
The elderly troll female poked him again.
He looked down.“Stop doing that.”
She huffed, unmoved.“You need meat.”
“I don’t need–”
“And sleep.”
He growled.
“And less growling.Growling shakes the baby.”
Nick blinked at her.“That is not how babies work.”
The female regarded him with the flat, unimpressed patience of every grandmother who had ever lived.“You know babies?”
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
Across the cavern, Kara coughed into her bowl with the kind of vigor that suggested she was burying a laugh inside it.Again.
The female nodded once, as though she had won an argument that hadn’t been formally opened.“Exactly.Sit.”
“I’m not sitting.”
The black eyes narrowed by a single, dangerous degree.“Do you want the mother upset?”
His gaze snapped to Kara before he could stop it.
She was watching him over the rim of her bowl withthatlook.The one that said she was trying very hard not to smile because she loved him, but also because she found his current suffering wildly entertaining and was willing to pay good money for a longer performance.
His wolf huffed in his chest, defeated by a tactical maneuver that hadn’t been fair from the start.Nick sat.
Wadim made a sound that started as him clearing his throat and ended somewhere in the vicinity of a sob.
“Not one word,” Nick warned.
Wadim pressed his lips together so hard they paled, and he nodded with the solemnity of a man at a funeral he was personally enjoying.
